So, the first job was to find an album’s worth of song titles that could feasibly be included in the Editorial. Looking for some suggestions, I asked one of the other editors on the team (Gav), but the track listing of Nevermind by Nirvana would have been somewhat challenging… (‘Lithium’ would have been easy, ‘Territorial pissings’ somewhat tricky and ‘Smells like teen spirit’ downright difficult).

Since Nature Physics published a Joy Division-inspired cover in 2016, I’ve been a little envious (OK, consumed with jealousy), but the track listing on Unknown Pleasures would also have been hard to incorporate into an Editorial. (As an aside, if you are not familiar with the back-story to the cover of this album, then this is a great read). So, if not Joy Division, how about the band that followed: New Order?

I’m a New Order fan – I’ll admit that one of my ringtones is Blue Monday (and as another aside, if you haven’t seen this Orkestra Obsolete version, you *really* should). Looking through all the albums, the track listing of Republic seemed to be the most amenable to being hidden in roughly 800 words of a chemistry/publishing-themed Editorial.

The tracks are as follows: Regret, World, Ruined in a day, Spooky, Everyone everywhere, Young offender, Liar, Chemical, Times change, Special, Avalanche. Although you’d think ‘spooky’ might be one of the hardest to work in, that one turned out to be pretty simple thanks to the 1,000th Article featuring ‘one-thousand’ in its title. The most challenging were ‘young offender’ and ‘liar’… but I managed to pull together a first draft and they didn’t stick out like a sore thumb. I also got ‘Republic’ and ‘New Order’ in there too. After Gav was done with it, he had managed to add the record label: ‘London’ and also the studios where the album was recorded: ‘Real World’.

Here’s the published version with the 15 words/phrases highlighted.

There’s no Substance to this Editorial…

And just for good measure, ‘rise of the internet’ makes another appearance in a Nature Chemistry Editorial (see number 13 here).

The introduction to the paper includes the following paragraph, with some fairly bold claims in it:

Here we present the first large-scale and systematic study of scientists across many disciplines on Twitter. As our method does not rely on external bibliographic databases and is capable of identifying any user types that are captured in Twitter list, it can be adapted to identify other types of stakeholders, occupations, and entities. Our study serves as a basic building block to study scholarly communication on Twitter and the broader impact of altmetrics.

The study makes a big deal of the fact that it finds scientists directly on Twitter by looking at the names of Twitter lists (rather than identifying scientists outside of Twitter and then using them as a starting point to build up a network of scientists that are on Twitter). The sampling method leads to the identification of 110,708 users included in 4,920 lists that contain recognized scientist titles in the list names. This sample is then refined by looking for scientist titles in the profile descriptions of the individual users and this gives a dataset of 45,867 scientists.

These are the top scientist titles from profile descriptions (Table S2 in the paper) – I’ve added the highlighting.

And these are the top scientist titles from the names of the Twitter lists (Table S3 in the paper) – again, I’ve added the highlighting.

Those numbers for chemists don’t look all that big to me (and others have said so on Twitter too). And if the sample identified in this paper is representative of Twitter as a whole, it means that there are something like 10-20 times more physicists on Twitter than there are chemists. (I’ve chosen to compare physics and chemistry because they are both traditional core scientific subjects, but admittedly that’s about as rigorous as my analysis gets).

So…

(1) Maybe there are 10-20 times more physicists on Twitter than there are chemists.
(2) Maybe physicists are more likely to self-identify than are chemists (we’re a shy and retiring bunch after all…).
(3) Maybe the sampling method used in the study does not give a representative view of Twitter as a whole and picks up more physicists than it does chemists.

My analysis is far from scientific, but I figured I’d look at some other numbers… specifically follower totals (all correct as of April 14, 2017) for some accounts. Now, there are many reasons why any given account on Twitter has the number of followers that it does (bots, activity, awesomeness, other random stuff), but consider the following:

How about UK scholarly societies?

@PhysicsNews 154,125 followers (official account of the Institute of Physics)@RoySocChem 22,852 followers (official account of the Royal Society of Chemistry)

So sure, the physicists seem to have the upper hand in the UK, but now take a look at the US:

Of course, it is not just chemists following the chemistry-related accounts and not just physicists following the physics-related accounts, but if there were an order of magnitude more physicists on Twitter than chemists, I think I would expect this to be reflected in the physics accounts listed above having, in general, larger numbers of followers than the corresponding chemistry accounts. Based on my totally unscientific survey of a small number of accounts, I would hazard a guess that the numbers of physicists and chemists on Twitter are not as different as the PLOS One study suggests. So, does the study overestimate physicists or underestimate chemists? Either way, my confidence in the study is not terribly high.

I’ve curated twolists here on this blog (totalling 199 chemists – was 200, but hey) and I have another list on Twitter that includes more than 300 chemists, so that’s well over 500 chemists in total. Also bear in mind the quite active #RealTimeChem hashtag (and the @RealTimeChem account itself). And for an example of the scale at which chemists interact with Twitter, check out the recent #RSCPoster event, for which the numbers are quite impressive.

The chemists are there on Twitter, perhaps some people just need to look a bit harder to find them.

It is, apparently, #WorldPoetryDay (on Twitter at least) and the question of writing a scientific paper in poetry form cropped up again (it does every now and then). And when it does, I usually end up digging through the dusty folders on my computer to find the few examples of chemistry poetry that I’ve come across over the years. To save me doing that again, I figured I’d just compile them into a blog post (and if you do know of any more examples, please point me to them in the comments below).

Let’s start with this classic from 1971 in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. A paper with the title ‘Comparative mobility of halogens in reactions of dihalobenzenes with potassium amide in ammonia’ doesn’t sound like it promises much in the way of literary sparkle, but take a look at how it starts:

In 2014, we even got in on the act at Nature Chemistry. To celebrate our 5th birthday, each editor who had worked on the journal to that point chose their favourite paper and wrote a short piece explaining their selection. The article was introduced as follows:

We’ll let Maskill have the final word, however, with this paper in Croatica Chemica Acta in 2014. He starts by explaining that he’s published a sonnet and a haiku in Nature, but that other forms of verse should be explored:

Even more poetic license…

The article contains three limericks, but the final one is arguably the best:

Maybe all TOC text should be written in limerick form? Or maybe not.

Know of any other scientific papers written in verse? Let me know in the comments!

Last December I was fortunate enough to find myself in Sweden for almost a week to join in with the celebrations surrounding the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It’s hard to put into words just what that was like (although I will try at some point in the hopefully not-too-distant future with a blog post). It was a busy week, but the day before the award ceremony and banquet on December 10th (it’s always on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death), I had an opening in my schedule and an offer from Brett Thornton and Emma Karlsson to take me on a periodic-table pilgrimage.

Brett has coauthored a range of essays for Nature Chemistry over the years and Emma has provided beautiful illustrations (one example can be found here) for some of them. After discussing what the options were for some chemistry-themed tourism in and around Stockholm, I think it was Brett who pointed out that the small village of Ytterby isn’t all that far away. For the chemists reading this post, you’ll probably have some idea of the significance of Ytterby; for those of you who don’t, let me explain. There are now 118 recognized elements with a seat at the periodic table and 4 of them (just over 3% of them!) are named for this little Swedish village.

So, on Friday morning we set out by car from Stockholm and headed for a little place that has played a large part in the history of chemistry.

Ytterby attained! A sign-selfie with Brett and Emma.

The story of Ytterby has been told by others on quite a few occasions and I’m not about to rehash it here. But to give you some context to the pictures below, here’s a brief summary: Ytterby is the home to a mine (closed since 1933) in which Carl Axel Arrhenius, a Lieutenant in the Swedish army (and no relation to that Arrhenius), found unusual heavy black rock in 1787. He sent samples to Johan Gadolin who analysed them and identified what later became known as yttria (yttrium oxide) which kicked off a chain of discoveries of new elements. Although originally named ytterbite, the new black mineral found in Ytterby was later renamed gadolinite in honour of Gadolin. It turned out, however, that yttria samples weren’t just yttrium oxide, but contained other oxides and, ultimately, was the source of ten new elements: yttrium, terbium, gadolinium, erbium, thulium, holmium, dysprosium, ytterbium, lutetium and scandium (see more detailed posts here and here).

So, shortly after arriving in Ytterby we found this sign, including a shout-out to the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics for superconductivity in ceramic materials:

The front of the sign – how’s your Swedish?

If your Swedish isn’t up to it, there’s always the other side (although it’s not a translation of the Swedish, it’s just more information about the history of the mine). There’s also something a little funky going on with that formula – the first zero should actually be a capital ‘O’ and there’s a spurious minus sign at the end (once an editor, always an editor…):

The reverse side of the sign at the bottom of the mine steps.

We then climbed up a set of wooden steps to reach the top of the filled-in vertical mine shaft. There’s a pretty good view once you’re up there.

The steps leading up to the filled-in mine shaft.

From the top of the steps there is a short path that leads into a small clearing that is surrounded on all sides by what’s still visible of the mine walls (presumably the shaft was not filled right to the top after the mine was closed).

On top of the filled-in mine shaft. Brett and Emma for scale ;-)

I really don’t know a lot about rock formations or geology, but Brett and Emma pointed out a few notable features in the mine walls. The one shown below is sort of a star-burst pattern, which is apparently an indication of radioactivity. Perhaps my Google-fu is not up to it, but I couldn’t track down any more information about these patterns, so if any geologists are reading this, please comment and tell me more! There’s no doubt that Ytterby mine has relatively highlevels of natural radioactivity though.

A star-burst pattern in the rock of the mine wall.

There’s also a fairly big crystal (I think Brett said it was feldspar) to be found in the mine wall – thanks to Emma for providing scale!

A big orange-ish crystal in the mine wall!

And returning to my geological ignorance, I have no idea what any of this is, but it looks pretty:

One kind of rock that I can’t identify, forming seams in another type of rock that I have no idea about either…

There are also reminders of human activity at the mine, including a metal rod in the rock face and also some writing. I assume it’s not graffiti – if it is, it’s rather classy considering the use of Roman numerals. I wonder what the significance of 1864 was?

The writing’s on the wall.

After inspecting the walls for a little while, Brett said there was a plaque somewhere nearby denoting the mine as a landmark and so we set about looking for it. If you stand at the entrance to the clearing (facing the mine) there are some boulders to your left and a short climb up over these takes you to the ASM International sign:

This sign at the top of the mine sums things up pretty well.

We then headed back out of the clearing and walked up around the edge of the mine shaft by following a path to the right (which seemed to go through, or at least very close to, somebody’s back garden). This takes you up above the mine where there is a small ventilation shaft, which isn’t much to look at. On the other hand, the view from above the mine is quite stunning (or it was the day we were there):

The (pretty spectacular) view from above the mine.

Before the trip, Brett pointed out that a few of the roads in Ytterby are named for some of the elements and we set about finding as many of these as we could as we walked through the village to and from the mine. Here’s a Terbium Road selfie:

Just in case you’re confused about how Terbiumvägen got its name.

And here’s Tantalum road:

Another road in Ytterby named for an element that was present in the mine.

It’s not just elements that get in on the act, some roads are also named for minerals too. There’s Fältspatsvägen and also Gadolinitvägen:

I’ll meet you at the corner of Gadolinite Road and Yttrium Road…

With all the sights seen, it was time for lunch and so we headed to nearby Vaxholm (which, incidentally, is where Carl Axel Arrhenius was stationed when he visited the mine at Ytterby and found the black stone that started the whole story). Apparently there is now a museum in the fortress that includes an exhibit about the Ytterby mine (we didn’t visit, but the folks from the Periodic Table of Videos have been there).

Vaxholm Fortress – built in 1544 to defend Stockholm from naval attacks and now the home of a museum.

Being in Stockholm for the Nobel festivities was an incredible experience and the opportunity to visit the Ytterby mine while I was there (which essentially amounts to a holy site for chemistry) made it even more special. Many thanks to Brett and Emma for being my tour guides that day. The next day was pretty special too, with the Nobel ceremony and banquet, proving that for some a visit to Sweden in December is not a rare-earth mine, but a gold mine…

Didn’t expect to be getting quite so close to one of these last December…

After someone (Per-Ola Norrby, I think) pointed out that my original list of 100 chemists on Twitter is now down to 99 (there’s 100 in the blog post, but the Twitter list only has 99 members now that one of those listed seems to have left Twitter…), I thought I’d finally get around to doing another list…

Just to head some of you off at the pass, here’s a reminder of what I said last time:

1. This is not a list of the top 100 chemists on Twitter (or the 101-200th best chemtweeps). It’s pretty much random – it’s not based on follower count, h-index or anything else silly like that.

2. Not everyone on this list is necessarily a card-carrying chemist, but they are all people who, more often than not, have something to say on Twitter about chemistry in all its many guises.

3. As with any list, its content is biased by its creator (me in this case). Feel free to leave comments, including the names of your favourite chemtweeps that I have inevitably missed, and to criticize, analyze and deconstruct this list to your heart’s content. Also let me know if any links are wrong/broken.

4. I think I’ve limited this to real people (rather than journals or blogs), but there are lots of other great chemistry Twitter feeds you could follow (also noted in the first list). Don’t forget about Compound Interest too…

I’ve just returned from #ACSPhilly (the 252nd ACS meeting in Philadelphia) where I got to meet some awesome chemtweeps, many for the first time. This was my first ACS meeting since March 2009 (the one in Salt Lake City) which, coincidentally, is the same month that I joined Twitter.

I was kindly invited to speak in the ‘Crafting chemical communication’ symposium organized by @DrRubidium and @jamesbatteas. A few people asked for a copy of my presentation and so I figured I would post it here. My usual title — ‘The nature of chemistry publishing’ — was not allowed by the ACS gods, but James came to the rescue and added the ‘On’ at the beginning. Apparently talks at ACS meetings cannot begin with ‘The’ — I imagine there is a very good reason for this*.

Many thanks to a reader of this blog for forwarding to me an email that they received from Angewandte Chemie thanking them for being one of their ‘outstanding referees’. I applaud such referee-recognition efforts; more journals should do this.

What caught my eye, however, is that the final paragraph of the e-mail mentions statistics related to Angewandte Chemie (and one other journal; can you guess which one?), backed up with 6 figures. First are a couple of graphs showing where submissions to Angewandte Chemie come from (for 2001-2015) and the geographical breakdown of referees (for 2008-2015). It appears that, in 2015, more submissions came from East Asia (somewhat unhelpfully not defined) than any other region and that more referee reports came from Germany than any other country. I don’t feel that I can reproduce the actual graphs here because I did not make them and nor have I sought permission to reproduce them (hey kids, we call this part of the blog post ‘foreshadowing’).

After discussing submissions and referees, the final paragraph goes on to discuss citation metrics in a somewhat contradictory fashion; I’m going to quote from the e-mail now and assume this won’t get me into any hot water (legal or otherwise):

“Too many scientists are obsessed with metrics these days. Figures 3-6 in the attachment demonstrate that Angewandte Chemie publishes indeed many highly cited papers (one only has to look at absolute numbers).”

Which is a bit weird, no? Hey everyone, too many people are obsessed with metrics these days, so here are MORE metrics for you to look at. Hmm.

Did Angewandte Chemie acknowledge in the e-mail that they sent to their referees where these figures came from? I don’t think so (at least not as far as I can tell; perhaps the figures contain hyperlinks, but in the flat version forwarded to me, there is nothing that appears to attribute the figures to me).

What Angewandte Chemie have done, however, is to add logos for GDCh, Angewandte Chemie and Wiley-VCH to the bottom of each figure. Stay classy Angewandte, stay classy. You are now the Daily Mail of chemistry publishing. You couldn’t even be bothered to get the data yourself and re-plot it!

To be fair, they have invested a huge amount of time and effort to add a title and a footnote to each figure, but I’m not sure that means you can ignore where you got the actual figure from.

Now, I get the impression that Angewandte Chemie is unhappy with my citation-distribution blog post. ‘Why?’, I hear you ask. Well, we also get treated to figures 5 and 6. Figures 5 and 6 from the e-mail that they sent to their referees are not my figures, so I will not reproduce them here (take note, Angewandte). I will, however, describe them to you. Figure 5 basically puts the data from figures 3 and 4 onto a single graph, but retains the y-axis scale from figure 4. What this does of course, is put the Nature Chemistry data in the noise. This figure very clearly proves that Angewandte Chemie publishes more papers than Nature Chemistry; I’m pretty sure there are simpler ways to plot this, however.

Now, figure 6. Figure 6 takes the portion of figure 5 that looks at the citation range from 40-100+ citations (except, of course, they simply use the label ‘100’, not ‘100+’ like I did on my graphs… c’mon Angewandte, attention-to-detail folks!). Now, what this graph shows is that when you consider citations in 2014 to papers published in 2012 and 2013, Angewandte Chemie has many more that have accumulated 40-100+ citations than Nature Chemistry. This is not surprising. Angewandte Chemie publishes many very good papers and many highly cited papers. And considering that in 2012-2013 it published almost 20 times as many papers (reviews and research papers) as Nature Chemistry, of course it’s going to have more.

The purpose of my original blog post was, for the most part, to examine citation distributions – it was a follow-up to another blog post that looked in detail at what contributed to Nature Chemistry‘s 2014 impact factor. Sure, I can see how the post could come across as a citation pissing-contest, but the only specific comparisons I make in the text of the post are somewhat superficial and are between Angewandte Chemie and the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) and between Angewandte and Chemical Science. I explicitly pointed out that the y-axis is very different across the charts I plotted for 6 different journals. I did offer a way in which you could compare journals if you wished to, by considering the percentage of published items with a given number of citations. The only way to make any comparisons is to normalize for quantity (and even then it might not be all that meaningful).

Anyway, I find it interesting that Angewandte Chemie compared itself to Nature Chemistry in its e-mail to its referees. I thought I would be helpful and do the comparison for them to JACS; the graphs are below. In terms of published items, the 2012-2013 counts are 4572 (Angewandte) and 5939 (JACS), so roughly similar – well, much more similar than Nature Chemistry and Angewandte for a start.

Here’s my version of figure 5 from Angewandte‘s e-mail to its referees (only with JACS data instead of Nature Chemistry):

And here’s my version of figure 6 from Angewandte‘s e-mail to its referees (only with JACS data instead of Nature Chemistry):

Well, look at that, JACS publishes more highly cited papers than Angewandte Chemie! They also publish more papers in total too. Read into that what you will.

So Angewandte, if you do fancy using these graphs in your next e-mail to your referees, don’t put your logo on them and do acknowledge where you got them from – but I do give you my permission to re-use them for that purpose.

With regard to your unauthorized and unattributed re-use of my figures in the e-mail that you have already sent, I kindly ask that you send a follow-up e-mail to everyone that received it noting where the images came from, including a link to the original blog post.

I don’t know if your use of my images in an e-mail that went to hundreds of people counts as ‘publishing’ them, but regardless, it seems only fair to give credit where credit is due – just like you are doing with your outstanding referees.

UPDATE 3:45 pm, 15 March: I’ve had a very nice e-mail from Angewandte Chemie apologizing for their oversight and they also shared with me the draft of the follow-up e-mail that they intend to send to the referees and asked me for any comments I had concerning it. I take it back, they are not the Daily Mail of chemistry publishing after all.

UPDATE 3:35 pm, 17 March: As pointed out in the comments below, and also confirmed in e-mails from others, Angewandte has indeed followed up with the referees as they said they would. I thank them for doing this so quickly and without any fuss whatsoever.